Well known Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman have raised $20 million from Time Warner and existing investors Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Dag Ventures for their web navigation startup Kosmix taking the fledgling’s total backing to $55 million.

Other Kosimix investors include Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos and Ed Zander (yeah, the failure from Motorola).

Categorization Engine
Kosmix, which debuted in beta form Tuesday, is touted as a web guide that organizes the Internet by topic.

Kosmix’ backers describe the core of the startup’s technology as a sophisticated categorization engine.

Apparently, Kosmix’ technology scours billions of Web pages and structured data points to aggregate, categorize, and return content specifically related to a user’s query.

Our Take
We played with Kosmix for a while but didn’t see anything remarkable other than an aggregation engine that pulls together related content  (and sometimes not so related stuff too) from diverse sources like Wiki, Google, Yahoo Answers, YouTube et al.

We don’t see players like India-specific search engines Guruji or web aggregators like Kosmix getting anywhere unless Google disappears tomorrow.

And what do you think the chances of Google disappearing anytime soon are! 😉

Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman are IIT and Stanford alumni.

The duo developed an e-commerce search engine called Junglee and sold it to Amazon.com in 1998.